OBITUARY: Karim Aga Khan — Imam of the atomic age

SHAH Karim Al Hussaini, better known to the world as the Aga Khan, was a prince without a physical realm. Yet he mingled with kings and presidents, and oversaw a fortune reportedly worth billions of dollars.

Prince Karim, who passed away on Tuesday at the age of 88, was the 49th hereditary imam of the Ismaili Muslims, and the fourth to bear the title of Aga Khan. In his nearly 68-year tenure as Ismaili imam, he worked for the socioeconomic uplift of his flock, as well as the larger communities wherever Ismailis could be found.

Claiming descent from the Ismaili imams that would separate from the Shia mainstream in the eighth century, Prince Karim was very much a man of the modern world.

Born in 1936 in Geneva, Prince Karim assumed the imamat at age 20 in 1957, when he was declared heir to his grandfather, Sir Sultan Mahomed Shah, Aga Khan III. Both his father Prince Aly and his uncle Sadruddin were bypassed by his grandfather and Prince Karim, described as a “handsome young Harvard man” in a Time magazine article from 1960, became the leader of millions of the Ismaili faithful. He would finish his studies at Harvard (obtaining a BA Honours in Islamic History) after becoming imam. Talking to Vanity Fair in 2013, he described receiving his grandfather’s mantle as “a shock”.

Ancient roots, modern outlook

Though the Ismaili imamat goes back 13 centuries, both the ‘prince’ and ‘Aga Khan’ titles in his name can be traced to the mid-19th century, before Prince Karim’s Iranian forebears left their homeland to relocate to the subcontinent. The first to hold the title of Aga Khan was his great-great-grandfather, Hasan Ali Shah Mahallati, the 46th Nizari Ismaili imam. He was granted the title by Fath Ali Shah, Qajar monarch of Iran. The shah also married his daughter to Hasan Ali Shah, linking the subsequent Ismaili religious leaders to the Qajar royal house, and earning them the title of ‘prince’. Hasan Ali Shah would in 1844 leave Iran for the subcontinent, settling in Bombay, now Mumbai, permanently in 1852.

A global jamaat

Prince Karim, known to his followers as ‘his highness,’ or the more reverential ‘Mowlana Hazir Imam’, continued the mission of his grandfather Aga Khan III of equipping his murids (followers) with the tools necessary to adapt to life in the modern world. His flock, said to number between 12 and 15 million people as per community sources, live across a vast geographic area.

From the Pamirs of Central Asia to the coastal cities of East Africa, Nizari Ismailis have maintained communities in these locales for decades if not centuries. There are of course populous communities in the subcontinent, including Pakistan, where members of the jamaat can be found in Karachi and along Sindh’s coastal towns, Gwadar, Chitral and Hunza. Moreover, new jamaats have struck roots wherever South Asian immigrant communities can be found in the ‘new world’, for example in the great metropolises of the US and Canada.

Karim Aga Khan’s link with Pakistan was a strong one. For example, one of Karachi’s top hospitals, founded in 1983, bears his name while the Aga Khan University Education Board, started in 2003, offers qualifications up to the intermediate level. He visited the country on several occasions and various organisations linked to him are active throughout Pakistan, particularly in the health, education and socioeconomic sectors.

Socioeconomic impact

A major focus worldwide of Karim Aga Khan’s work for his own followers as well as other communities was on health, education and socioeconomic uplift. He established a web of agencies and organisations that implemented his vision of human development.

These include the Aga Khan Foundation, the Aga Khan Development Network and the Aga Khan Trust for Culture.

The AKU maintains campuses in Pakistan, East Africa and the UK, while under Prince Karim’s watch the Institute of Ismaili Studies was established in London in 1997. Furthermore, the Institute for the Study of Muslim Civilisations was established by the AKU in 2002, while the University of Central Asia, with campuses in the ex-Soviet Central Asian States of Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan and Tajikistan, was established in 2002.

Another of Prince Karim’s achievements was the adoption of a constitution for his community in 1986. His grandfather had started this endeavour by giving his followers in East Africa a similar document in 1905. But Prince Karim’s constitution was supposed to apply to his murids across the world.

Karim Aga Khan also oversaw a vast portfolio that included his own personal wealth, as well as funds dedicated to his jamaat. In fact, a 2013 article in Forbes dubbed him ‘Venture capitalist to the Third World’, due to the investments he made in what can be termed emerging markets. Much of his personal wealth was inherited from his grandfather, while the ‘institutional wealth’ he oversees comes from the donations and religious taxes paid by his murids. Apart from his religious funds, he had invested in several businesses, including media, hospitality, banking and insurance.

In the realm of culture, Prince Karim’s Aga Khan Trust for Culture supported hundreds of projects across the globe. Some of the prominent restoration projects included Lahore’s Walled City, Humayun’s tomb in Delhi, as well as the gardens of Babar’s mausoleum in Kabul.

The late Aga Khan married twice and sired four children: Princess Zahra and Princes Rahim, Hussain and Aly Muhammad. He appeared to be a man of contradictions — a globe-trotting aristocrat who belonged to a tradition dating back to one of the oldest schisms in Islam, an ‘imam of the atomic age’ for his followers. His successor, Prince Rahim, will be the 50th Nizari Ismaili Imam. No doubt, the new ‘Hazir imam’ will have to guide the flock through even more complex times.

Published in Dawn, February 6th, 2025